Zhongtang Luo (How to Read: Zone-Tan Lowe) 羅中瑭 Ph.D. Student Department of Computer Science Purdue University Institutional Email: luo401 [at] purdue [dot] edu Personal Email: zhtluo [at] gmail [dot] com CV       Google Scholar       Codeforces       Twitter

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Bio

I am currently pursuing my Ph.D. in the Computer Science department at Purdue University, where I have been enrolled since 2021, under the guidance of Prof. Aniket Kate. I am a member of the Freedom Research Lab. Prior to this, I earned my M.S. at Purdue University. I completed my B.S. in the Zhiyuan ACM Class at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, where I studied from 2016 to 2020.

In my research, I look at how to make industry and academic work on cryptography, distributed systems, blockchains, and applied security match up better, especially in how they handle efficiency and security. I've looked at things like consensus and data provenance. I see that companies focus on making their prototypes fast and efficient, while academia cares more about making sure these prototypes are formalized and secure. This difference creates a gap. My main question is: Can we find a way to make prototypes that are both fast and formalized?

Publications

• Cauchyproofs: Batch-Updatable Vector Commitment with Easy Aggregation and Application to Stateless Blockchains
  [Preprint] [Preprint]
  
  Zhongtang Luo, Yanxue Jia, Alejandra Victoria Ospina Gracia, Aniket Kate
  
• Sharding SMR with Optimal-size Shards for Highly Scalable Blockchains
  [arXiv] [Preprint]
  
  Jianting Zhang, Zhongtang Luo, Raghavendra Ramesh, Aniket Kate
  
• Proxying is Enough: Security of Proxying in TLS Oracles and AEAD Context Unforgeability
  [SBC'24] [Preprint] [Slides] [Talk]
  
  Zhongtang Luo, Yanxue Jia, Yaobin Shen, Aniket Kate
  
• Attacking and Improving the Tor Directory Protocol
  [IEEE SP'24] [Preprint] [Poster] [Slides] [Talk]
  
  Zhongtang Luo, Adithya Bhat, Kartik Nayak, Aniket Kate
  
• Last Mile of Blockchains: RPC and Node-as-a-service
  [IEEE TPS'22] [Preprint]
  
  Zhongtang Luo, Rohan Murukutla, Aniket Kate
  
• RandPiper - Reconfiguration-Friendly Random Beacons with Quadratic Communication
  [CCS'21] [Preprint]
  
  Adithya Bhat, Nibesh Shrestha, Zhongtang Luo, Aniket Kate, Kartik Nayak

Projects

• OrgAn: Organizational Anonymity with Low Latency
• A Tor Consensus Monitor that Detects Equivocation

Mentoring

I had the honor of mentoring students from various outreach programs such as GoBoiler and Future Mentors Program:

• Alejandra Victoria Ospina Gracia (Universidad San Francisco de Quito)
• Akshat Neerati (Purdue University)

My mentoring statement can be found here.

Teaching

• CS41100 - CP3 Competitive Programming III (Spring 2025) (Instructor)
  [Course Page]
• CS41100 - CP3 Competitive Programming III (Spring 2024) (Instructor)
  [Course Page]
• CS31100 - CP2 Competitive Programming II (Fall 2023) (Instructor)
  [Course Page]
• CS25100 Data Structures & Algorithms (Fall 2021) (Teaching Assistant)
  [Syllabus]

Services

• ACM TOIT 2023, 2024 (Reviewer)
• ACM CCS 2022 (External Reviewer)

Competitive Programming

I am an active participant in competitive programming. I won a silver medal in ICPC 2018 World Finals with my wonderful teammates: Wenda Qiu and Boning Li.

• Competitive Programming Hall of Fame: Zhongtang Luo
• OIer: 罗中瑭
• Codeforces: Zhtluo

A couple tutorials on certain subjects in CP:

• Linear Sieve
• Mobius Inversion
• Dirichlet Convolution
• The Application of ML Techniques on Certain Problems
• Splay Tree: One Tree to Rule Them All
• From Burnside to Polya: A Short Introduction to Group Theory
• Constant Optimization on Binary Exponentiation and Matrix Multiplication
• Constant Optimization and Cheesing through NAQ
• LLL — Yet Another Paper-Reading Problem
• Rant on Incorrect ECNA 2023 C (Computational Geometry)
• The Reason You are Bad at Codeforces — You are Not Russian Enough
• All You Need is Randomly Guessing — How to Improve at Codeforces
• Obfuscation, Expansion, Diversity: On the Complexity of Solution Models in Competitive Programming
• For the Love of God, Stop Using C++ 23 in Competitive Programming

CTF Write-up

• Raymond James CTF 2023 Write-up
• BuckeyeCTF 2023 Write-up
• Purdue Raymond James Qualifier Write-up

Miscellaneous Projects

Projects not related to academia:

• vjudge-to-tex: A script that transforms VJudge descriptions to TeX files with ChatGPT
• Event to ICS
• TikZAI: a ChatGPT Tool to Generate TikZ Code from Hand-Drawn Figures
• A LaTeX Slide and Poster Template for Purdue University

Random Subjects

Other stuffs that I have written - notes, essays, etc:

Editing

• Random Vim Commands

Purdue

• Circumvent Purdue Microsoft Authenticator
• Link Your Homepage in Purdue
• Purdue Tundra Server Specification & Access
• Connect to Purdue VPN without Cisco
• Purdue CS Printer Setup for Ubuntu
• Use PAL and eduroam in Purdue

System Setup

• Webcam on Dell XPS13 9320 with Ubuntu 23
• Set Microsoft 365 Office Outlook as Default Email handler for Chrome
• HP Color Laser Jet MFP Email Setup 'Test was unsuccessful'
• My Screen Setup on Ubuntu
• Inaccessible Boot Device after Installing SSD to a New Machine
• Dual Boot Windows and Ubuntu with Full Disk Encryption
• Anacron and Mail Backup
• Host an E-mail Service on Your Own VPS
• Host a Website Fast
• Use Specific Fonts on a Website
• Use Math Formulas and Syntax Highlight in HTML
• VSCode SSH as root

Notes

• Concentration Bound
• Some Interesting Papers

LaTeX

• Use bibtool to Extract from CryptoBib
• Material Design Icons in LaTeX
• Gitignore for TeX
• Write Japanese and Chinese in LuaTeX
• Use TeX Gyre Font in LuaLaTeX
• Use LaTeX, SVG and EMF Files in Google Slides
• Circumvent arXiv LaTeX Detection
• LaTeX Math Font List
• Position a Graph, Scope, etc. in TikZ
• Convert LaTeX to Image